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Archive:
Day: November 21, 2016
Why didn’t the reformation spread between Orthodox Christians?
I encourage my followers stumbling on this to read the other answers. (I always do!) My perspective is rather different from theirs. I’ll speak to Constantinople rather than Moscow, though I suspect it’s the same story. Under the Ottoman Empire, the Orthodox Patriarchate was two things which would have blocked the Reformation. The Patriarchate was […]
Is it grammatically correct to use “they” as a singular pronoun?
There’s some critical nuance being missed in answers so far (though I strongly suspect it’s come up elsewhere here). The closest is in the sources mentioned by Mark A. Mandel, and the answer given by Matthew Carlson. The old use of singular they is with reference to an non-specific entity, where the use of gender […]
How much does our knowledge of obscure languages depend on missionary work which preserved and exposed them?
Quite a bit. I trained around fieldwork linguists. Which was a colossal mistake for someone working on a European language. But useful if you want to be exposed to typology. I hear the IPA horror stories of my peers here, and blanche. Can linguists differentiate between all the sounds of the IPA? Now. Fieldwork linguists […]